Local, LAN control

Gianluca Barbaro

Last week I lost control over my house, for 12 hours, because something went wrong with iTead systems.

Sonoff devices device works flawlessly per se, and I'm very happy to have 13 of them around my house.

But...

I'm beginning to think there's a glitch in their marketing model. I haven't thought for a moment that they want to spy on us, like some else implied in this forum, but every serious usage require redundancy and backup.

We cannot rely on the whole "cloud" model to be always working: too many things can go wrong on the user side, on itead side and, eventually, on the side of the many third party service providers involved (ISPs and Cloud providers above all).

Every digital and/or networking system might stop working every now and then. While we can surely afford not to remotely switch on a light, what about water heating, house heating, door opening, surveillance systems?

I did my best to build redundancy in my installations, but there are two factors that are not easily overcame.

First, some sonoff device might be (and in my case are) difficult to be physically reached: inside walls or up near the ceiling, the onboard switch is almost useless in these cases.

Second, Dual sonoff aren't capable of manually switching the connected devices on/off: if the system isn't working (i.e. they are offline), the only possible solution is to uninstall them, which is not acceptable at all.

iTead (and coolkit) seem to be trying to sell their solution to third parties (other manufacturers who are supposed to relay onto their whole solution, cloud included) which is cool. If I had to, I would guess that's why they are so "cloud-centered": to offer a easy and rapid solution, all included. It's cool.

But other than toyish usages, without redundancy their solution is unimplementable: I hope they realize this soon (if they haven't already).

The solution that comes to mind is very simple, and a few have already suggested it here: a dual control system. The cloud is great for remote control, but when the app is on the same local network the sonoff devices are, everything should switch to local. Simply put: automatic switching to LAN control.

If I'm home, I should be able to control my devices even if my Internet connection is down.

If they could do this with an open protocol, that would be top. But after all, not everyone of us wants to build his/her own system: I'm cool with their app, they can keep their protocol reserved as much as they want. To me, the only thing that matters is that I don't ever lose control over my house again.

Other than the above, thank you iTead, I'm very happy with your products!

Andrew McInnes

Larry Dunn

The fucking cloud id down AGAIN and I cant access my stuff or control it. Fuck this shit. Im done with them and Im posting negative reviews every place I can find.

D

Daniel

said
almost 2 years ago

While I still think iTead should give us a way to control the switches locally, I want to encourage those of you that feel confident with a soldering iron to flash the Sonoff-Tasmota Firmware to your devices. I own 2 Sonoff-Touch, 8 Sonoff-Basic and 2 Sonoff-TH16 and flashed this firmware to all my devices and it's working flawlessly. Sure, it's a little tedious to open them up and solder pin-headers in, but it's well worth the trouble. You get the added bonus of only having open-source on your switches. You can also add sensors to devices like the Sonoff-Basic which doesn't have this feature out of the box. I'm using Node-Red and Mosquitto on an old Raspberry Pi to control the switches and node-red-contrib-alexa-home to expose them to my Echo devices. To have convenient local control I use MQTT-Dash on my Android phone. If you want to have MQTT-control from outside of your home, I recommend bridging your local Mosquitto to cloudmqtt.com. I'm completely happy with this solution.

D

Don Jenkins

said
almost 2 years ago

A few weeks ago I lost control of my house!!! After a week of intermittent connections I installed

Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 3B (hass.io) and re-flashed all my Sonoff's to "Tasmota firmware"...

I now have full control of my Sonoff's, and other brands of switches, and sensors work also.

M

Michael

said
almost 2 years ago

Hey Don,
thats nice for you, but it will not help most of the users, because they are USERS and no technical freaks. It's the job of itead to make the sonoff devices working unfailing.
But I think they just wand to make quick money.
The switching times becomes more and more slow, the last update of the adroid app makes more problems, then the version before, local LAN was promised more then ones but and nothing happend.
I think for USERS it will be the best to buy devices from a reliable maker and forget sonoff and Itead
Regards
Michael

2 people like this

D

Don Jenkins

said
almost 2 years ago

I agree with you 99%.... In my case is wasn't the slow response, but the fact Iteads servers were offline

and I could control nothing. As far as Hone Assistant (Hass.io) on a Raspberry Pi, one needs little technical knowledge as the user interface is a web page, and no knowledge if Linux is required.

E

EB

said
almost 2 years ago

Unfortunately, given the flakiness of their servers and their unwillingness to improve it, they still don’t make changing the firmware as easy as they could. There is no good reason why they couldn’t facilitate OTA exchanges of the initial firmware. You still have to open the device (ending the pretend warranty) and solder on a few pins. You also have to get a USB to serial thing. Cheap and not hard, but it must put people off.
Imagine if you could just select alternative firmwares in the app…

J

Jon Homer

said
almost 2 years ago

Don, one may not need much technical knowledge to install Hass on a raspberry pi, it is still more than the majority are happy with to say nothing of the considerable knowledge one needs to flash Tasmoto which is needed for the raspberry pi to have any use.

S

Singhforceone

said
almost 2 years ago

Guys, for this feature request to be noticed and prioritised ITead have previously said that you must LIKE the ORIGINAL POST at the very top by Gianluca. It only has a mere 65 likes so a lot more of u need to like the top most post.
This is a big problem, I've got 30 of these but can't really recommend them as a proper or professional home Automation IoT device as they must have a local stateful repository, like Mosquito MQTT broker server that can interact with home automation systems like OpenHab. This is just poor integration. It should priority read it's config state from eWeLink/ITead and then secondary read/write if a locally supplied MQTT broker is provided to it's config. Keeping eWeLink and Local Mqtt Configs in sync based on most recent config change and NTP.
Guys remember to Like the very top post by Gianluca.

2 people like this

ס

סוגי נח

said
almost 2 years ago

TASMOTA AND YETI APP

P

Prem Raj

said
almost 2 years ago

hi guys,

getting quite tired of waiting for itead folks to come up with a solution to allow local lan control so i am planning to take the plunge and start flashinging them with custom software. for those who have done this successfully, i would like to tap on your expertise for the following:

(1) i see a lot of youtube videos demonstrating how to flash these switches and use them with home assistant and the likes of. however, i see that they are all using a single channel sonoff touch switch. will software like tasmota support 2 and 3 channel sonoff touch switches?

(2) is there a way to flash sonoff rf bridge?

(3) will the rf functionality of the sonoff touch switches be disabled after flashing? what i mean is does flashing with software like tasmota still allow the rf to work on these switches?

many thanks in advance.

m

mohammad hossein norouzi

said
almost 2 years ago

Hi guys
Finally Itead done local control over only one channel device and only turn on/off function
New app version is 3.5.0 that support local control option
First it will release for android device after that for iOS device

L

Larry Dunn

said
almost 2 years ago

I see I have the new up-date with the option for LAN, but there is no explanation for those of us who have no clue.

What does that actually mean?

When I try to Enable LAN, it says "Successfully connecting with 0 device over LAN".

Sounds to me like its not working, so what is this supposed to do for us?

M

Michael

said
almost 2 years ago

When I try to Enable LAN, it says "Successfully connecting with 0 device over LAN".